On Movies: My Favorite Movies from the 1960s

I was born in 1963, eight months before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. I started going to the movies in 1969; the first movie I remember seeing theaters was John Sturges’ 1963 World War II/POW action-adventure film The Great Escape. I saw that in a now-closed Bogota movie theater, the Almirante, with my half-sister Vicky and one of her paternal first cousins. Because I was so young and going to the movies was a relatively rare treat during my family’s six-year-long stay in Colombia, I don’t think I saw more than three or four films in a theater between 1966 and the spring of 1972.

As a result, I saw most of the films in this list for the first time in the 1970s when they aired either on the Big Three networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) or on independent stations such as Miami’s WCIX-TV (now CBS affiliate WFOR). One, To Kill a Mockingbird, I saw at South Miami Senior High when many 10^th grade English classes read Harper Lee’s eponymous book as part of the curriculum. Others I saw for the first time when I added them to my Blu-ray collection.

According to the colorful pie chart on my Blu-ray.com account’s My Collection Statistics page, movies (plus three seasons of the Star Trek television series) produced and released in the 1960s account for 7.1% of my Blu-ray collection, which now consists of 330 feature films (and 53 TV seasons).[1] Therefore, this list is shorter than the others in the On Movies: My Favorite Movies from the _____’s series.

And as Jackie Gleason used to say, “Away we go!”

1. The Magnificent Seven (1960)
2. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
3. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
4. The Longest Day (1962)
5. The Great Escape (1963)
6. The Pink Panther (1963)
7. From Russia with Love (1963)
8. Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
9. Zulu (1964)
10. The Sons of Katie Elder (1965)
11. Thunderball (1965)
12. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
13. The Dirty Dozen (1967)
14. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

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[1] My DVD collection, which I started in 1998 and I still get a few titles for when there’s no Blu-ray or 4K UHD version available, is smaller: 166 theatrical films and 65 seasons’ worth of various TV series, including The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones, Ken Burns Presents: The West, and CNN’s late 1990s documentary series The Cold War.